Who’s Raisin on the Right?

Word from the grapevine is that three of California’s best-known faces are no longer nameless. The three dancing raisins, which appear in ads for the California Raisin Advisory Board, were named last month in a contest sponsored by the Fresno-based group.

Those names selected from among 310,000 entries were: Ben Indasun (wearing sunglasses), Tiny Goodbite and Justin X. Grape.

Why the decision to name the raisins? “It wasn’t even our idea,” said Robert Phinney, director of advertising and promotions for the board. “People kept writing and asking us what their names were, so we decided it must be time to name them.”

Caspar’s Pay is Better Now

Former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, in town last Thursday to speak at a luncheon organized by Business Tokyo, a monthly English-language Japanese magazine, took the podium just as dessert arrived. He urged the assembled Japanese and American executives at the Biltmore Hotel to go ahead and eat, explaining: “I was brought up in the California Legislature, where nobody paid any attention to anything you said.”

The pay is better now, though, than when he was elected to the state Assembly in 1952. For a hurried rehash of his concerns about Soviet designs in the Pacific, Weinberger received $36,000.

A Fond Farewell, Indeed

It can pay to quit your job, or at least it did for Stephen M. Wolf.

Wolf quit his job as chairman and chief executive of Tiger International last December to assume the same jobs at Allegis Corp., the parent of United Airlines. But even though he was leaving, Tiger’s board still loved him.

Tiger’s proxy reveals that the company gave him a $255,000 going-away present. That farewell bonus is in addition to the stock options Tiger heaped on Wolf to lure him there in the first place.

The payment “recognizes the accomplishments of Mr. Wolf at Flying Tiger Line,” Tiger’s air cargo subsidiary, says Larry M. Nagin, Flying Tiger’s general counsel. Wolf restored profits to Tiger during his 16 months there, largely through hefty wage concessions by workers.

Better Luck This Time

Warner Communications Chairman Steven J. Ross probably doesn’t believe that he’s a jinx. But just in case, he gave fair warning to the folks attending the National Cable Television Assn. annual meeting at the Convention Center last week.

Taking the podium as a panelist to talk about the outlook for the cable-TV industry, Ross said the only other time he had appeared before a similar meeting was six years earlier. Then it was the electronics industry and, Ross said, smiling ruefully, Warner owned a company called Atari. The crowd started chuckling immediately, obviously remembering the catastrophic business reverses of that video-game manufacturer in 1983, followed by a general video-game industry slump.

After the laughter died down, Ross added: “Good luck to everybody out there.”